Nick Cave shows his work

The deluxe edition of Push The Sky Away comes “with a facsimile of the notebook Cave worked out the album’s lyrics in.”

“Some of it’s dreadful and painful to read, but I just thought – what the fuck,” he says, before getting the actual notebook out and offering me a brief precis of his working methods. “Pages and pages of absolute shit,” he sighs, turning them over. “Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit. And just every now and then something, little tiny ideas start to come out.”

And how refreshing to note that he, too, suffers from imposter syndrome (something I write about in chapter two of Steal Like An Artist):

After 30 years of live performance, the prospect of getting onstage still fills him with “fucking dread”. Whenever he releases a record, he says, he finds himself gripped by the fear that he is “going to be exposed, people are going to realise I was never really that good anyway, someone’s going to come round and find out I was supposed to be a different person or something like that”.

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